“What better way is there to memorialize a writer than to read what he has written and remember who he was in all those worlds of words he was brave and confident enough to imagine in the first place?” These words from Hilton Als’s remembrance of Derek Walcott, who died in 2017, inspire this tribute to the poet, hailed “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision” when awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992.